Via LinkedIn.
The glaciologist Heidi Sevestre has shared some of the tunes that she listened to while on a recent field visit to Antarctica.
In January 2026 she completed the Under Antarctica expedition.
On her website, she has shared what she was listening to while out on the continent.
She says:
Juba from Cigcola from Smelly Feet Records got in touch about a series called The Expansion, asking a simple question: what were you listening to out there?I sent back an embarrassingly long answer. Three months on a kite, eight to ten and sometimes twelve hours a day, with a landscape that barely changes — you have a lot of time to fill. So I'd treated Antarctica as a blank page and used it to catch up on every book I'd ever meant to read.
Mostly audiobooks, if I'm honest. Music gets repetitive fast when it's the same songs day after day, but a good story could carry me for a week. I started with the heroic age — Endurance, In the Kingdom of Ice, Icebound — until I got quietly fed up with those explorers complaining about the cold while I was there just as frozen.
So I widened out: the Apollo missions, Vikings, Mandela, Michelle Obama, Marcus Aurelius, the suffragettes, Inuit mythology before heading to Greenland, and a stack of books on climate solutions. And Shantaram, which I first read on my very first expedition in the Himalaya fifteen years ago, and which was a completely different book this time.
And what about the music that she listened to?
Smelly Feet Records created a podcast weaving the books and music together.
